After Nearly Dying, Mountaineer Returns to Everest

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Many graduate students feel like their research is killing them,
but for Young Hoon Oh, that was actually true.

On a 2006 expedition to Mount Everest for fieldwork, Oh's body
was so starved for oxygen as he descended the mountain that he
nearly died.

"My oxygen regulator was kind of broken almost at the top, so
there was no oxygen," Oh said. "I was almost crawling down to the
final camp."

Oh, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California,
Riverside, will lead a second expedition in May to the summit of
the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) peak, the . The trek is fieldwork
for his anthropology dissertation, which focuses on
mountaineering in the Himalayas. Oh, a mountaineer with 15 years
of climbing experience, is studying how the
Sherpa society of mountain guides has changed after nearly a
century of aiding hundreds of international climbers.

"I'm very interested in understanding their experience," Oh told
OurAmazingPlanet. "Many anthropologists have written about
Sherpas, but their explaining of their mountaineering activities
were very limited."

By climbing to the
summit of Everest and living among the Sherpa community for
15 months, Oh hopes to put himself in Sherpa shoes so that he can
better understand the famous guides' relationship with the
mountain and to document the impact of mountaineering on their
culture

"Their understanding of mountains has changed a lot," Oh said.
"The reason for the change is due to foreign mountaineers."

For example, Sherpas have traditionally seen mountains as
spiritual places, but some Sherpas have come to see dollar signs
when looking at Mount Everest.

But before Oh can live among the Sherpas, he must
again transform himself into a mountaineer He will lead a team
of three South Korean mountaineers on a $150,000 expedition,
which will be funded by the Alpine Club at Seoul National
University in South Korea.

Oh will head to Seoul in late March where he will meet his two
climbing companions. From there, the trio will fly to Katmandu,
Nepal, and continue to the Lukla airstrip built by Sir Edmund
Hillary, the New Zealander who, in 1953, was the first
to reach the top of Mount Everest, accompanied by his Sherpa
guide, Tenzing Norgay.

From Lukla the climbers will hike for 10 days to the base camp at
the bottom of Mount Everest, where they will spend about a month
setting up four camps between the base camp and summit and
getting used to the altitude and thin air. Oh said he plans to
attempt the summit between May 15 and May 30, and will carry
his school's pennant to the peak.

You can follow OurAmazingPlanet staff writer Brett Israel on
Twitter: @btisrael.Follow
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